Another way you could use Reddit is just to create and customize your own Subreddit. In essence, a subreddit is just like a niche forum (you could also build your own with for example Discourse) where you can set specific rules, add moderators for each subreddit and voting systems for links, self-posts, and comments that depends on the subreddit theme

[Create a community on Reddit]

Reddit lets you easily create different types of communities - public, restricted and private ones and also customize the appearance of your community. So in a nutshell, Reddit can be a perfect place to create easily your own community without thinking about software or server costs.